Hard Grace

I can’t keep myself from saying it to God, this raw sob echoing that of Teresa of Avila: “If this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder You have so few!”^a Can I be that honest?

I am David lamenting, “Why, Lord …?” (Psalm 10:1). Why this broken world punched through with losses? “How long, Lord?” (Psalm 13:1). How long until every baby thrives and all children sleep down the hall from a mom and dad wrapped up in love, and each womb swells with vigorous life, and every single cancer clinic sits empty and we all grow old together? How long?

I know a neighboring Mennonite woman folding away the clothes of her dead son, and I sit in a room full of the battered and busted and I lament: Please. And He takes the empty hands and draws me close to the thrum of Love. You may suffer loss but in Me is anything ever lost, really? Isn’t everything that belongs to Christ also yours? Loved ones lost still belong to Him — then aren’t they still yours? Do I not own the cattle on a thousand hills; everything? Aren’t then all provisions, in Christ also yours? If you haven’t lost Christ, child, nothing is ever lost. Remember, “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22 NASB).

The dark can give birth to life; suffering can deliver grace.

If all the work of transfiguring the ugly into the beautiful pleases God, it is a work of beauty. Is there anything in this world that is truly ugly? That is curse?

Can I believe the gospel, that God is patiently transfiguring all the notes of my life into the song of His Son?

What in the world, in all this world, is grace?

I can say it certain now: All is grace.

I see through the woods of the world: God is always good and I am always loved.

God is always good and I am always loved.

Everything is eucharisteo.

Because eucharisteo is how Jesus, at the Last Supper, showed us to transfigure all things — take the pain that is given, give thanks for it, and transform it into a joy that fulfills all emptiness. I have glimpsed it: This, the hard eucharisteo. The hard discipline to lean into the ugly and whisper thanks to transfigure it into beauty. The hard discipline to give thanks for all things at all times because He is all good. The hard discipline to number the griefs as grace because as the surgeon would cut open my son’s finger to heal him, so God chooses to cut into my ungrateful heart to make me whole.

All is grace only because all can transfigure.

I take to heart the words of Thomas Aquinas, who defined beauty as id quod visum placet — beauty as that which being seen, pleases.

I wear the lens of the Word and all the world transfigures into the Beauty of Christ.

Everything could be eucharisteo.

Lord of Life, when I am between a rock and a hard place, cause me to know it full well: You make all grace because You transfigure all. Cause me today to believe, right in the midst of hard things, that You are patiently transfiguring all the notes of my life into the song of Your Son. Today, let me do hard things: live the hard discipline to give thanks in hard things. Today, I lean hard on You — who softens my heart.